Bioshock developer Irrational Games announces it’s “winding down”

In a surprise announcement on the Irrational Games website today, Irrational cofounder and creative director Ken Levine announced that the development house behind BioShock Infinite would be "winding down" as Levine moves on to start "a smaller, more entrepreneurial endeavor at [Irrational owner] Take-Two."

"Seventeen years is a long time to do any job, even the best one," Levine wrote. "And working with the incredible team at Irrational Games is indeed the best job I’ve ever had. While I'm deeply proud of what we’ve accomplished together, my passion has turned to making a different kind of game than we’ve done before.

"To meet the challenge ahead, I need to refocus my energy on a smaller team with a flatter structure and a more direct relationship with gamers," he continued. "In many ways, it will be a return to how we started: a small team making games for the core gaming audience."

Levine's new endeavor will focus on "narrative-driven games for the core gamer that are highly replayable," according to the announcement. It will be exclusively focused on games that are delivered digitally. More details will be announced at a later date.

All but 15 of Irrational's employees will be let go as part of the move, Levine wrote, though they will have a "period of time" to put together portfolios and apply for other opportunities within Take-Two (or find work at other companies). "There’s no great way to lay people off, and our first concern is to make sure that the people who are leaving have as much support as we can give them during this transition," Levine wrote.

Boston-based Irrational formed in 1997 from the remnants of Looking Glass Studios, which worked on well-remembered PC hits including Thief and System Shock. In 2006, the company was purchased by Take-Two, where it developed both the original BioShock and BioShock Infinite (but not BioShock 2) and was briefly known as 2K Boston.

Irrational's dissolution is a bit of a shock given the critical and commercial success the studio received for BioShock Infinite just under a year ago and the pending release of that game's second bit of "Burial at Sea" downloadable content next month. The series, which has drawn a reported $500 million in revenue since launching in 2007, will remain under the control of 2K, Levine wrote, so that his new company can focus on building its own stories. "If we’re lucky, we’ll build something half as memorable as BioShock," he wrote.

Not surprising. There was a hell of a lot of bloat in development of the Bioshock titles, its quicker and cleaner to grab the team elite and take a fresh start than to go on a witch hunt for unproductive members and turn the entire office upside down killing morale in the process.

I'm just pondering things here - I wonder if this is a result of seeing very tiny teams such as Mojang (Minecraft) selling literally dozens of millions of copies of software and getting massive revenues (and profits) themselves instead of having to rely on any third party.

Not wondering in the sense "are they greedy", although that could be it of course; I'm more wondering if it's "we could be huge without any outside help, let's see if we can make it happen".

I'm just pondering things here - I wonder if this is a result of seeing very tiny teams such as Mojang (Minecraft) selling literally dozens of millions of copies of software and getting massive revenues (and profits) themselves instead of having to rely on any third party.

Not wondering in the sense "are they greedy", although that could be it of course; I'm more wondering if it's "we could be huge without any outside help, let's see if we can make it happen".

You would think if they wanted that then the whole 15-person "team" would have left Take-Two.

Not surprising. There was a hell of a lot of bloat in development of the Bioshock titles, its quicker and cleaner to grab the team elite and take a fresh start than to go on a witch hunt for unproductive members and turn the entire office upside down killing morale in the process.

This is what I think too. Any project goes on long enough in a big company like that it picks up extraneous people, dead weight that adds to costs but does not significantly push the project. There comes a time when things need to be cleaned up. Really this method seems as good as any.

This may also speak to a need for Take Two as a whole to revise how they assemble teams, how they divide up responsibilities, and how they re-organize as projects come and go.

Business is business. Nobody cares about people that's what you don't want to understand. The bosses wanted 1 billion pure profit and got only 500 million. It's natural that they kicked everybody out. Think if you order a bread and only get half a bread how would you feel? They are bosses for a reason. They got there by creating the profit. I think in this case they were actually pretty nice to let Levine and his team of losers stick around. Remember, they didn't deliver so they are losers.

The solution is to spend less money on development, not insist that the customer pay more and then feel grateful for the privilege.

Yeah, I especially hated the part where they sent the guy with the gun to force me to buy the DLC. DLC is actually a pretty good solution to a real-world economic problem. Every $60 sale today is worth less, in real dollars, than the $60 games of old. There is no getting around that. There's no getting around the fact that software, unlike cars, doesn't degrade, so used sales are inherently more of a problem for game companies.

The reality is that one way or another, that money needs to be made, so it's either charging more for everyone (and getting fewer customers) or delivering a good amount of game for $60, and then letting the largest fans of that game choose to opt in for additional content. I think that's a more elegant solution than raising prices across the board.

Wow...that would suck. If I were a person who'd worked my ass off to get a job and I had worked in a team and made a game like Bioshock Infinite that sold really well, and I learned that I no longer had job security after putting my heart and soul into something successful - I'd feel betrayed.

Job security ain't what it used to be. Very few people will make it through their career working for the same company.

I think this is just an excuse for TakeTwo to lay off employees. They'll keep those they want by offering jobs within the parent company. Sadly those that worked so hard on a game that made a lot of money will have little share and a very small safety net after doing something successful.

Ken Levine just discovered that what people wanted the most in their life is simple games like Flappy Bird with shitty graphics, recycled art, huge bounding boxes and simplistic fat finger control.Shocked by this fact, he doesn't want to spend 3 years on a project anymore since 3 days is more than enough for being Internet meme of the year.

The solution is to spend less money on development, not insist that the customer pay more and then feel grateful for the privilege.

Yeah, I especially hated the part where they sent the guy with the gun to force me to buy the DLC. DLC is actually a pretty good solution to a real-world economic problem. Every $60 sale today is worth less, in real dollars, than the $60 games of old. There is no getting around that. There's no getting around the fact that software, unlike cars, doesn't degrade, so used sales are inherently more of a problem for game companies.

The reality is that one way or another, that money needs to be made, so it's either charging more for everyone (and getting fewer customers) or delivering a good amount of game for $60, and then letting the largest fans of that game choose to opt in for additional content. I think that's a more elegant solution than raising prices across the board.

I bet you love microtransactions then, is even better than rebranding 15% of the game as DLC to charge more for less.

In a few years, if this continues, you will not get anything but the main menu without paying more, but hey, at least no one is forcing you to play the games.

I think this is just an excuse for TakeTwo to lay off employees. They'll keep those they want by offering jobs within the parent company. Sadly those that worked so hard on a game that made a lot of money will have little share and a very small safety net after doing something successful.

Do they need an excuse to lay off employees? Development teams can easily become bloated, projects ramp up and individual productivity can suffer, maybe they were carrying a lot of dead weight. I don't know, but their experience on a fairly successful project should help them find employment elsewhere.

It's not like Levine left with 15 employees and started a new venture. He layed off a crapload of people and kept a handful of guys. Why? This can't just be a situation where Levin felt the urge to "move on to new things."

If Take Two still needs their skills, they should have no problem keeping their job.

But Levine obviously doesn't need their services - at this stage of development of his next game - so why keep them on payroll when he has nothing for them to do?

Not trolling. I work in semiconductor manufacturing, and have - thankfully - survived a few lay-offs where I work. I hate the game, not the players.

I'm just glad to see they are giving people some advance notice, and a chance to evaluate what they want to do - unlike the no-advance-notice layoffs that are the norm in my industry.

That's one way to look at it, sure. But that presumes that Take Two and Levine felt that 1) BioShock franchise had no future potential as a Triple A franchise AFTER BioShock Infinite just sold sold 4+ million copies in the span of just a few months and was showed with critical praise as the shining example of what games can be, and/or 2) the Irrational Games team had absolutely nothing to off other than another BioShock title and the staff couldn't branch out into other content. I think both assumptions are highly questionable at best.

And we're not just talking about layoffs here, where some folks get cut from the payroll because they're not needed anymore. We're talking about the fundamental dismantling of an organization. This is like Florida Marlins winning the World Series and within a few months taking the entire team apart and trading away all the players (except in this case, Irrational is trading people -- they axing them).

The solution is to spend less money on development, not insist that the customer pay more and then feel grateful for the privilege.

Yeah, I especially hated the part where they sent the guy with the gun to force me to buy the DLC. DLC is actually a pretty good solution to a real-world economic problem. Every $60 sale today is worth less, in real dollars, than the $60 games of old. There is no getting around that. There's no getting around the fact that software, unlike cars, doesn't degrade, so used sales are inherently more of a problem for game companies.

The reality is that one way or another, that money needs to be made, so it's either charging more for everyone (and getting fewer customers) or delivering a good amount of game for $60, and then letting the largest fans of that game choose to opt in for additional content. I think that's a more elegant solution than raising prices across the board.

I bet you love microtransactions then, is even better than rebranding 15% of the game as DLC to charge more for less.

In a few years, if this continues, you will not get anything but the main menu without paying more, but hey, at least no one is forcing you to play the games.

And if the main menu is not worth the price of the game people won't purchase the game. Problem solved.

Wow...that would suck. If I were a person who'd worked my ass off to get a job and I had worked in a team and made a game like Bioshock Infinite that sold really well, and I learned that I no longer had job security after putting my heart and soul into something successful - I'd feel betrayed.

Programmers i seriously doubt get a % of the final profit of the game. Maybe a one time bonus when the game's done and it sells well. But in all honesty. They're already looking for the next job once the game is done.

It isn't about getting more money. It's about respect for your labor, your loyalty, and the level of effort you've expended while working for someone else. It's the difference between how you view the developer of Flappy Bird and how you view the developers of Deus Ex. If you'd found out that the writers for Deus Ex had found themselves out of a job a year later because the head of the company was bored with the company, how would you react?

I'd sooner take a job where my work was honored as it should be over a job that viewed me and my labor as expendable even if the latter paid twice as much.

Was there any explanation as to why they're shutting down instead of just finding a new person to head Irrational in Levine's place? Dismantling a successful team just because it's founder wants to do something different strikes me as highly irrational.

Wow...that would suck. If I were a person who'd worked my ass off to get a job and I had worked in a team and made a game like Bioshock Infinite that sold really well, and I learned that I no longer had job security after putting my heart and soul into something successful - I'd feel betrayed.

"narrative-driven games for the core gamer that are highly replayable"

This is sort of laughable considering his narratives are insanely overrated (omg a "twist" ending,,, 10/10!!!!!!!!!!), his games never targeted core gamers (they targeted people who wanted to feel like a core gamer), and none of his games were very replayable.

"As for those of you who spent $20 on the Bioshock Infinite Season Pass, well, sorry."

Not sure isn't there like the three dlc that came or are comming out. That's not a bad deal then

To me, at least, the Burial At Sea add-ons are the only worthwhile ones, so if I hadn't gotten the Season Pass on sale I'd've been ticked at spending $20 for ~6 hours worth of bonus content.

Regardless, it still seems kinda sketchy to sell a "season pass" only to have the studio shut down 6 months after they started fulfilling that pass's promise. That's a bit disappointing.

But the season pass is only for the two Burial at Sea episodes, Clash in the Clouds, and the Early Bird Bonus pack. BaS ep. 1, CitC and the bonus pack are already out and BaS ep. 2 is coming out in March as mentioned in the article... so it's not like you're NOT getting anything promised/purchased with the season pass.

$20 says he is going to start a VR team. Because there is so much still to be figured out in that realm it doesn't make sense to bring over a large full stack team of people, but rather move to a flatter experimental model.

I guess I'm not the world's biggest BioShock fan, but 3 excellent games is enough. It's OK to leave it at that and move on to new things. I like it when a series goes out when it's on top. It helps me remember it the way I want to remember it.

Sure, that's a positive. I'd rather not see the developer stumbled around with a bloated, hugely expensive BioShock MMO.

But aren't you a little troubled by this news? It's not like Levine left with 15 employees and started a new venture. He layed off a crapload of people and kept a handful of guys. Why? This can't just be a situation where Levin felt the urge to "move on to new things."

That's 15 people who can take what they know to 15 different projects, many of them having much more pull because of their experience on a successful and respected franchise.

Irrational is one of only three real remaining game development companies in the Boston area. We all know how Harmonix is doing (poorly), and Turbine isn't doing much better. Sad days, since all the developers at Irrational will either have to move or work outside gaming.

I'm shocked at this. Not the news, but the reaction from people who didn't realise this sort of thing has been the norm in video game development for the last few decades.

Studios come and go all the time, even successful ones. The ones who survive for many years in a stable state are very much the exception, not the norm.

It seems a hard industry to survive in. I hope all the people being retrenched get further work from this (and it's a Good Thing that they're being given time to build up their portfolios, rather than immediately shown to the door).

$20 says he is going to start a VR team. Because there is so much still to be figured out in that realm it doesn't make sense to bring over a large full stack team of people, but rather move to a flatter experimental model.

Gotta figure out the hardware first. Games will take longer.

It's actually the software (or rather, the control paradigms and lots of middleware) that need the most work. The hardware is pretty much a Solved Problem, the work being in taking the solutions in the high-end space and making them cheaper (e.g. going from microdisplays and complex optics to larger displays and simple optics), with the biggest remaining hurdle being making positional tracking cheaper. From the looks of the Crystal Cove prototype this has boiled down to optical-marker outside-in tracking (as it has for almost everyone else ever in the history of VR), though I've got Sixense's STEM on order which may be Good Enough for limbs and torso tracking.

No, the hard part now is making VR controllable and pleasant for home use. Industrial VR is typically conducted in dedicated large, empty rooms, and is simulating 1:1 interaction in large empty virtual rooms (with some exceptions like Omni-directional Treadmills, and stationary CAVE setups). Consumer VR has to work in small, cluttered environments and generally simulate much larger interaction spaces (except for cockpit-constrained games) with a much greater than 1:1 scaling, but retaining 1:1 scaling for head movement and limb movement. That is definitely not a Solved Problem.

Where hardware really needs to advance is in haptics. Waving your arms and legs with no tactile or proprioceptive feedback gets real old real fast, and requires a whole field of interaction hacks to make even vaguely tolerable (e.g. 'ghost' limbs moving through objects, snapping, out-of-bound warnings, etc). The closest available in industry are things like the Cyberhand, but they are rarely used and only handle fingers. Even in university research providing haptics for anything more than an arm at once is very unusual (and usually from re-purposing rehabilitation hardware). Whether this takes the form of an exoskeletal frame covered in motors, or a more direct stimulation of sensory neurons (Palmer Luckey himself has mentioned experimenting with Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation) remains to be seen. The later is certainly more elegant, but the former is a lot more practical to implement.

Whoops, that got a bit wall-of-textTL;DR: VR software needs a whole lot of work to make it easier to develop for without inducing motion sickness by violating rules of thumb that haven't been codified yet. Ken Levine has a Rift. Lots of developers are looking to get in on the ground floor of VR and get an opportunity to do low-level & foundational work that many of them seem to enjoy/miss, e.g. John Carmack, Michael Abrash.

I'm shocked at this. Not the news, but the reaction from people who didn't realise this sort of thing has been the norm in video game development for the last few decades.

Studios come and go all the time, even successful ones. The ones who survive for many years in a stable state are very much the exception, not the norm.

It seems a hard industry to survive in. I hope all the people being retrenched get further work from this (and it's a Good Thing that they're being given time to build up their portfolios, rather than immediately shown to the door).

Im not sure why you and others making your point are getting down voted, some of the response to this news has been quite baffling as if some of the people commenting have only just heard of the games industry.

The industry wasnt all that stable a place to work when we were pottering around on Spectrum +3s, it isnt that stable a place to work today, and it most certainly wont be a hugely stable place to work in the future.

It operates, (Like a large chunk of the entertainment industry.) on major projects, bursts of effort that involve hundreds but after they are done... they are done.

What do you expect them to do? Pay for staff who no longer have a purpose, indefinitely? Thats not how any job in any industry works. Or perhaps youd like Levine to just come up with any ol major project to give them an excuse to work? You think thatd be better, that thatd produce decent results? because that kind of sounds like exactly the kind of big budget pandering that people complain about being tired, unoriginal, lacking in depth.

I have every sympathy for those being laid off but when there is no more work to be done there is no more job to hold on to, and they are going out of there way to make sure the staff land on their feet. (In fact, while they dont go as far as Levine has, many of the major studios being fully aware of the fluid nature of work in the industry are set up to deal with shifting staff around, preparing them to go, giving plenty of notice, funding, portfolio time etc. Seriously, this is not a new thing, its how theyve operated for years. Not all jobs have good security, this isnt even necessarily a bad thing.)

Kyle Orland / Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in Pittsburgh, PA.